In between if the weather gets colder or raining and less conducive to cabinet work I'll work on the chassis. The speaker cone looks great: to keep them that way I always fasten a piece of cardboard over them to keep from sticking my fingers through the cone.. The tuning cap was dirty so blasted it well with CRC Electronic Cleaner. Five of the six tubes test good. They are mixed brands with the sole Firestone Air Chief 35Z5 probably original.
The 500K volume control had been replaced at one point but in order to get a split splined shaft the tech sort of kludged together the shaft off the old control onto the body of a build-a-control (think that's the name) where you can install your choice of shaft type. He didn't have the right part and made do.. The mechanical connection was iffy at best. J-B Weld to the rescue and the control works as it should.
The chassis is really crammed tight: they could have increased the size of it by an inch or two in both directions and made it much easier, and cheaper for them (and me) to wire. The chassis is lost in the cabinet with plenty of room all around it. As such I knew I was going to have to replace some components not in the neatest way that I would have liked to. Doing it perfectly would mean yanking some of the coils and I didn't want to do that. Look below: the filter can terminals are buried just behind the volume control. They had to build this thing in layers.
Since real estate under the chassis is so tight, I also decided to restuff the topside can. This took a little more heart surgery. Lots of fun making a drawing of where all the wires go and then getting the can out. Since this won't show I just hacksawed the base off the can. Funny: the guts pulled out of the can actually smelled like a cow barn. The can is isolated from the chassis with a phenolic mounting wafer and has a cardboard sleeve over it. It all went back together nice and easy. Note that the can looks original but is a shorty inside a taller outer sleeve. Odd. You can look down inside the open top tall sleeve and see the can top down in there.
